A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

... released today. *Confetti!*

Available from:

MIT Press, Amazon, B&N, or (I hope!) your local independent bookseller.

Some initial reviews and discussions.

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Preface

I enjoy writing short philosophical reflections for broad audiences. Evidently, I enjoy this immensely: Since 2006, I’ve written more than a thousand such pieces, published mostly on my blog The Splintered Mind, but also in the Los Angeles Times, Aeon, and elsewhere. This book contains fifty- eight of my favorites, revised and updated.

The topics range widely -- from moral psychology and the ethics of the game of dreidel to multiverse theory, speculative philosophy of consciousness, and the apparent foolishness of Immanuel Kant. There is no unifying thesis.

Maybe, however, there is a unifying theme. The human intellect has a ragged edge, where it begins to turn against itself, casting doubt on itself or finding itself lost among seemingly improbable conclusions. We can reach this ragged edge quickly. Sometimes, all it takes to remind us of our limits is an eight-hundred-word blog post. Playing at this ragged edge, where I no longer know quite what to think or how to think about it, is my idea of fun.

Given the human propensity for rationalization and self-deception, when I disapprove of others, how do I know that I'm not the one who is being a jerk? Given that all our intuitive, philosophical, and scientific knowledge of the mind has been built on a narrow range of cases, how much confidence can we have in our conclusions about the strange new possibilities that are likely to open up in the near future of artificial intelligence? Speculative cosmology at once poses the (literally) biggest questions that we can ask about the universe and reveals possibilities that threaten to undermine our ability to answer those same questions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence.

Not all of my posts fit this theme. It's also fun to use the once-forbidden word "fuck" over and over again in a chapter about profanity. And I wanted to share some reminiscences about how my father saw the world -- especially since in some ways I prefer his optimistic and proactive vision to my own less hopeful skepticism. Other of my blog posts I just liked or wanted to share for other reasons. A few are short fictions.

It would be an unusual reader who enjoyed every chapter. I hope you'll skip anything you find boring. The chapters are all freestanding. Please don't just start reading on page 1 and then try to slog along through everything sequentially out of some misplaced sense of duty! Trust your sense of fun (chapter 47). Read only the chapters that appeal to you, in any order you like.

Riverside, California, Earth (I hope)
October 25, 2018